What is Responsive Web Design?

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a technique for building websites that work on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop screens. Not long ago, websites were typically designed specifically for laptop and desktop screen resolutions. This worked fine until the advent of web capable smart phones and tablets.

We design websites that automatically adjusts and adapts to the inflexible screen resolutions of desktop/laptop computers, mobile phones or tablets – responsive web design (RWD). With the incredible increase in the number of mobile device users over the past decade, businesses must have websites that can be accessed without difficulty by smartphone and tablet users on these devices for interacting with e-commerce sites.

Survey after survey has found that mobile device users report visiting a competitor’s website if the one they originally tried to access did not contain elements of RWD. Websites developed only for traditionally-sized screens do not appear whole on smaller screens. Columns of information may be missing, images warped or missing altogether and elements vital to increasing revenue, sales and conversion rates often fail to load properly. Consequently, businesses neglecting to upgrade their website with professionally incorporated RWD techniques could potentially lose thousands of customers, new leads and search engine ranking.

Here are more reasons why the success of your business demands responsive web design essentials that naturally attract mobile device users and keep them coming back:

The cost effectiveness of having just one website optimized for desktop/laptop and mobile devices instead of two websites is consistently significant and allows businesses to delegate extra funds towards the business itself. This also allows you to easily maintain one website without worrying about if what you are doing will work on both traditional (computer) screens and a customer with a tablet.

Google likes websites that contain responsive web design elements. And with a large percentage of the search market share, Google’s preferences should be addressed by site owners if they want to remain relevant to search queries. In fact, Google reps have stated that Responsive Web Design is the industry’s “best practice” because RWD sites have the same code base/language and only one URL.

Consolidation of reporting and analytics–with one website developed from a variety of responsive web design strategies, businesses do not need to spend extra time tracking conversion paths, redirections, user journeys or funnels between two or more sites.

Responsive Design is Preferred for SEO. Typically, Responsive Websites perform better and are easier to maintain. One thing not mentioned above is that a challenge of having a separate mobile site is that you will need to build the authority of this site from scratch, and who wants to go to that extra trouble?

Ask any internet guru or industry insider what one aspect of website design companies should be focusing on in order to sustain their viability in the increasingly competitive world of e-commerce and they will answer with responsive website design strategies. With more people choosing smartphones and tablets over other Internet-enabled devices, businesses that fail to use RWD will find themselves lagging far behind in the brutally competitive race among websites to attain high ranking and comprehensive exposure to users worldwide.

Contact us today to discuss your design needs… and yes, we can even redesign an existing site to be responsive!

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Global Nerds
2014-12-27T19:30:39+00:00 December 27th, 2014|Comments Off on What is Responsive Web Design?